职业倦怠（burnout），一种与工作有关的特殊压力，人们用这个词来描述他们是如何感到身心俱疲的——他们可能热爱自己的工作，却被永远做不完的活儿耗尽了精力。这种倦怠仿佛一旦降临，便无法摆脱。2021 年的一项研究发现，大约五分之三的员工拥有职业倦怠的症状，而新冠疫情让这种感觉变得更重了。在新冠大流行期间，越来越多的人发现他们的工作生活变得更加难以掌控。美国加州大学伯克利分校（University of California, Berkeley）健康工作场所跨学科中心（Interdisciplinary Center for Healthy Workplaces）的荣誉教授克里斯蒂娜·马斯拉赫（Christina Maslach）说：“我一开始并没有特别的兴趣或计划去研究职业倦怠，因为我从来没有听说过这样的事情。”马斯拉赫职业倦怠量表（Maslach Burnout Inventory，MBI）——职业倦怠的主要测量工具之一——就是以她的名字命名的。在上世纪七十年代初期到中期，马斯拉赫主要研究人们是如何管理强烈的情绪的。她采访了急诊室医生或警察等经常须要应对紧张工作环境的人。采访接近尾声时，采访对象经常会对她说：“我能告诉你点别的吗？我能和你谈谈另一件事吗？”采访对象分享说，他们感到压力巨大、疲惫不堪、与周围世界脱节。马斯拉赫当时想不出合适的词描述这一现象，但有一天，她遇到了一位从事贫困法工作的女士，这位女士说，他们把这称作“职业倦怠”。马斯拉赫把这个词说给她的受试者时，他们的反应是立竿见影的——同一时期，一位名叫赫伯特·弗罗伊登贝格尔（Herbert Freudenberger）的美国心理学家在 1974 年发表了一篇论文，讲述了他和一些在免费诊所工作的同事如何应对工作负担与压力。他写道：由于对精力、体力或资源的要求过高，人们开始出现失误、疲惫不堪或精疲力竭，而这种情况正发生在他所认识的最敬业的人身上。马斯拉赫则继续从有同样感受的人那里收集故事。当她在一本名为《人类行为》（Human Behavior）的科普杂志上发表了第一篇关于职业倦怠的文章后，“用现在的话来说，那篇文章简直就是‘病毒式传播’。我接到了无数个电话，收到了一麻袋通过邮政系统投递的信件，人们在信里说：‘哦天哪，我刚刚读了这篇文章，我还以为只有我一个人这样呢。’”很显然，职业倦怠在很早就已经引起了人们的共鸣。2019 年，美国作家和记者安妮·海伦·彼得森（Anne Helen Petersen）在 BuzzFeed News 上发表了一篇关于千禧一代职业倦怠的文章，引发了广泛的讨论。她本人在向美国心理学家亚当·格兰特（Adam Grant）描述自己的感受时表示：“我有点麻木了。我觉得没有什么令人兴奋的事情是我想报道的，我觉得自己没有什么好点子。我在和我的编辑通话时哭了起来，这很不符合我的性格。”过去二十年里，英国诺森比亚大学（Northumbria University）职业和组织心理学教授安东尼·蒙哥马利（Anthony Montgomery）一直在研究职业倦怠，他表示：“首先你会感到力不从心、精疲力竭，然后愤世嫉俗的情绪便会高涨，你会感到与工作脱节。”这些都助推了第三层的感受，即低效感、无力感。职业倦怠并非一种医学诊断，但它与抑郁、焦虑等疾病之间存在重叠部分。在过度工作的慢性、长期消磨下，你会觉得自己没有作为或者没有进步。这半个世纪以来，研究人员意识到职业倦怠并不只是源自个体本身，而是源于你与所处环境的相互作用。因此，仅仅对职业倦怠进行个人干预并不奏效，你没法靠“下定决心”来解决它。蒙哥马利：“职业倦怠作为一个概念意味着你的工作安排方式存在问题，进而导致了你的职业倦怠。因此，从某种意义上说，最重要的是我们要问，我的哪些工作安排方式影响了我感到倦怠的程度？”如果你的倦怠来自于你与外部世界的互动，而你又无法解决外部世界的问题，那么你会永远处在职业倦怠中吗？蒙哥马利说：“很多时候，你的老板或部门经理可能会说：‘我们不能给你涨薪，也不能给你更多的休息时间。’涨薪和放假并不容易达成，但他们能做的是……[查看全文]
You Can't Fix Burnout With Self-Care
Anthony Montgomery: The most important part of burnout is that it's about yourself, but it's also about others.Shayla Love: One of my New Year's resolutions was to be less burned-out. Maybe you can relate; you think, 'I'm going to better manage my stress this year. I'm going to make time for activities that I find nourishing and finally nail that work/life balance.' But just a few weeks into January, I found myself hitting a wall. The sense of renewal of a new year didn't manifest. The burnout I felt from 2023 had followed me—all the way into February.Burnout feels like something that descends upon you and then is impossible to shake off. A 2021 study found that around three in five employees felt symptoms of burnout, and COVID didn't make it easier. More people found their work lives getting more unmanageable during the pandemic, not less. When my resolution to fix my burnout with effort didn't work, I wanted to go back to the beginning of burnout's story and understand what it is.I'm Shayla Love, and you're listening to Scientific American's Science, Quickly.Today we're revisiting the concept of burnout: a word people use to describe how they feel exhausted, psychically tired with their jobs—that they may love!—or drained by the other obligations in their never ending to-do lists.Christina Maslach: I didn't start out with any particular interest or plan to study burnout, because I'd never heard about something like that.Love: That's Christina Maslach, a professor emerita at the University of California, Berkeley, in the Interdisciplinary Center for Healthy Workplaces. I called her up because one of the main measurement tools for burnout is named after her: the Maslach Burnout Inventory, or MBI.Maslach: This was in the early to mid-'70s.Love: Her research was on how people manage strong emotions. She decided to interview people such as emergency room doctors or police officers, who dealt with intense work environments. When her conversations were coming to a close, people would often say:Maslach: "Can I tell you something else? Can I talk to you about this other thing?"Love: People shared that they were stressed, exhausted and feeling disconnected. Christina didn't have a name for it, but one day, she met a woman who worked in poverty law. The woman said that in her world, this was called burnout. Christina brought this term to her subjects, and the response was immediate.Maslach: "How about burnout?" "Yes! that's it!" You know, it would be such an immediate reaction.Love: Around the same time, a psychologist named Herbert Freudenberger published a paper in 1974 about how he and some colleagues working in a free clinic started to respond to the workload and stresses. People were starting "to fail, wear out, or become exhausted by making excessive demands on energy, strength, or resources," he wrote, and it was happening to the most dedicated and committed people he knew. Christina continued to gather stories from people who felt the same way. When her first article came out about burnout in a popular science magazine called Human Behavior...Maslach: That article went, in today's terms, viral. People were calling me; I was getting sacks full of mail, you know, snail mail, from people saying, "Oh, my God, I just read it; I thought I was the only one."Love: Burnout has clearly resonated for a long time. Hearing these older stories reminded me of the overwhelming response to writer Anne Helen Petersen's 2019 article on millennial burnout in BuzzFeed News. So many people I knew shared that article back and forth, asking each other: Do you feel this way too?[CLIP: Anne Helen Petersen: "I kind of went numb."]Love: This is Anne describing how she felt to the psychologist Adam Grant.[CLIP: Anne Helen Petersen: "I didn't feel like anything was exciting that I wanted to cover. I didn't feel like I had any good ideas. I cried on Skype with my editor, which is very out of character for me."]Love: So what is this feeling that's been haunting us for decades?Anthony Montogmery: I've been working on burnout for the last 20 years.Love: Anthony Montgomery is a professor of occupational and organizational psychology at Northumbria University in England. I asked him what we've learned about how burnout feels since the '70s, when Christina and others first started circling around it.Montgomery: The first part is you feel overwhelmed and exhausted. The second part is you have heightened feelings of cynicism and detach from the job.Love: These play into the third quality, which is a sense of ineffectiveness.Montgomery: You feel like you're not accomplishing your work.Love: Burnout is not a medical diagnosis, though there's overlap between burnout and conditions such as depression or anxiety. It's a response to chronic conditions in which you are overworked and don't feel like you're making a difference or progressing. But here's maybe the most important part that's come out over the years: these feelings don't come from you alone.Montgomery: The most important component of burnout is not to keep it at the individual level.Love: Burnout arises from your interaction with your circumstances and the environment. This is why individual interventions for burnout don't really work. The solution to burnout is not, as I tried, to make a personal resolution about it. It's actually to look outward and ask: Why am I experiencing this? What about my job or interactions is leading to this feeling?Montgomery: Burnout as a concept means that there's something about the way your work is organized, which is causing you burnout or which is, you know, provoking burnout in yourself. So in a sense, the most important thing to do is for us to ask, you know, what is it about the way my work is arranged that is influencing the degree to which I feel burned-out?Love: Honestly, this made me feel both better and worse. It finally made sense why I couldn't self-care my way out of burnout, but this was also disempowering. If my burnout comes from my interaction with the outside world, and I can't fix the world, will I be burned-out forever?Amelia Nagoski: Burnout is the book that I needed.Nagoski: I ended up in the hospital twice with stress-induced illness. My sister, being Emily Nagoski, Ph.D., New York Times bestselling author, brought me stacks of peer reviewed science because, you know, that's the love language in our families: peer review.Love: Amelia tells me that at the same time as we recognize that burnout comes from our interactions with difficult outward environments, we still have power to feel better inwardly.Nagoski: Even though the things that are causing our stress are sometimes beyond our control, the stress that's happening is a cycle that happens in our body.Love: Their book is focused on how to complete an emotion cycle instead of getting stuck in the middle of feeling stressed and having it drag on in perpetuity.Nagoski: We can deal with that stress that's happening in our body in a separate process than the process we use to deal with the things that cause our stress.Love: This is where "self-care" comes into play: things such as exercise, breathing and spending time with friends. But these interventions aren't to fix the stressors that cause burnout—those are social. They're to help you get out of fight-or-flight mode.Montgomery: It's the fact that it's a social thing in your work means you can do something about it, you know, a lot of time. You know, your boss or your line manager might say, well, listen, we can't give you more money; we can't give you more time off. And sometimes they can't. And these things are difficult. But what they can do is...[full transcript]
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